The Room of My Own: How Tommy Wiseau’s Legendary Failure Launched My Love of “Bad Movies”

It’s difficult for me to remember precisely how I first became aware of the existence of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. The year would have been 2007; I can say that with certainty. I would have been a junior at the University of Illinois, an idealistic kid earning an instantly dated degree in print journalism (a terrible idea, which many attempted to disabuse me of to little avail) and cinema studies, and I suspect that my first mention of The Room might have come from one of the film’s early celebrity champions, perhaps as an off-hand reference on a now-forgotten episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien or The Daily Show. Maybe it was someone like Patton Oswalt, David Cross or Paul Rudd, noted appreciators of cast-off pop cultural trash and ephemera, and early proponents of Wiseau’s magnum opus. Whoever it was, I made a mental note: Track down this odd-sounding vanity project and see The Room for myself.

And in 2007, this was easier said than done, because the cult of The Room (first released 20 years ago this week) was very much still in its infancy. It was several years before Adult Swim would stun the U.S. airwaves by playing the movie as part of their April Fool’s programming. Wiseau was likewise years away from the many winking cameos he would make in alt-comedy properties throughout the 2010s. Most people who had seen The Room at this point were obsessive film nerds who had witnessed it in midnight screenings at genre film festivals, presumably walking out unsure of what they had just witnessed. It certainly wasn’t available via Netflix, even through its dearly departed DVD delivery service. The film was genuinely unknown–I could have walked around town “oh hai’ing” people for an entire afternoon without running into someone who understood the reference.

How lucky I was, then, to find myself in a liberal college town, at the alma mater of Roger Ebert, with ready access to one of the best independent video stores (RIP) I’ve ever had the privilege of visiting. And lo and behold, they owned a copy of The Room. As in, “a copy,” singular. But that was enough, and over the course of the next two years I probably returned to that video store and rented that same copy of The Room another half dozen times, whenever my roommate and I mutually agreed that a sufficient refractory period had passed and we were ready to scramble our brains with another viewing. It had already become ritual to us, long before I’d ever seen the film in a theater full of obnoxiously hooting and hollering film geeks.

The thing that immediately stood out about The Room, besides the utterly alien nature of Tommy Wiseau, was the obvious earnestness of the entire thing. This was so clearly the product of a wounded heart, a bitter cry of resentment toward the universe that one rarely has the courage to put on screen, as its writer-director-star vented his frustrations with the unconquerable cruelty of friendship and the romantic world. We couldn’t help but wonder about the painful reality that must have inspired The Room, even as we watched slack-jawed at its incredibly amateurish performances and inexplicable production choices. Never for a moment did we doubt its sincerity, though, and never for a moment have I believed Wiseau’s subsequent attempts to rebrand the film as “a comedy.” This man never intended anyone to laugh at The Room. He wanted a packed house wiping away tears at Johnny’s tragic demise, hoping beyond hope, perhaps, that the person who broke his heart would see the film and be consumed with guilt over what they did to him.

But we all know that’s not what happened. The legendary shoddiness of The Room–its disappearing characters, immediately introduced and discarded side plots, unintelligible dialogue, and every moment of Wiseau’s performance–instead gave the film an ironic double life, slowly building its status from a cult object of L.A.-area filmmakers and actors, into the foundational text of the modern “bad movie” culture of the web. By the early 2010s, it was gaining widespread infamy. In 2013, Greg Sestero’s The Disaster Artist provided the first behind-the-scenes account of its creation, providing answers for many of the film’s mysteries while introducing just as many new questions. And by 2017, Tommy was being played on screen by James Franco in The Disaster Artist’s Hollywood adaptation, The Room having come full circle from unknown vanity project to the subject of a wide-release Hollywood feature film in the space of 14 years.

Suffice to say, this was a strange feeling for folks like myself, who had initially discovered the movie back when it was more akin to a secret handshake among sarcastic film geeks. It was odd to see such an object of infamy become widely celebrated in its own unique way–odd to go to a packed screening of The Room in an art theater and witness hundreds of people throwing spoons or dressing up as characters, in the closest equivalent to a modern Rocky Horror Picture Show that our culture has produced. It’s hardly what I expected while first showing The Room to consternated friends in 2007 or 2008.

In retrospect, though, I find myself deeply thankful for the fact that the film came along and entered my world in the precise moment that it did. Despite having a lifelong love of weird cinema and shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000, before seeing The Room for the first time I rarely could say I made much of an effort to genuinely seek out and consume movies defined by their cults of infamy. Tommy Wiseau’s overwrought psychological melodrama effectively threw a switch in my mind, implanting a deep curiosity for what drives the kind of creators who produce films in the vein of The Room. The floodgates had been opened, and within a few years I was exploring the likes of Birdemic, Ben & Arthur and the entire oeuvre of Neil Breen. My fascination with both hucksterism and earnest failure grew at an exponential rate.

Without that push, would I ever have ended up enjoying the over-the-top sleaze of something like Andy Sidaris’ Hard Ticket to Hawaii, or the motorcycle-mounted ninjas of Miami Connection? Would I have produced some of my favorite Paste bylines over the years, like a career retrospective on Coleman Francis, the true worst director of all time, or an investigation of the mysterious end of B-movie studio Film Ventures International, whose founder disappeared in 1984 with $1 million in company funds? Surely I would never have ended up having lunch at a cheap Italian buffet in Denver with Glenn Berggoetz, the man whose $11 box office opening weekend gross for 2011’s The Worst Movie Ever! technically makes him the “most unsuccessful” director in history. None of it would have happened without the interest that The Room sparked.

It’s not hyperbole to say that my entire career and personal life could have hinged on this butterfly effect moment, that laying eyes on Tommy Wiseau’s unnatural visage is somehow one of the keystone events that directly shaped how my life has evolved. Without developing that interest in what I’ve so frequently described as simply “bad movies,” it’s likely that I never end up writing some of the earliest freelance pieces that led me to become a Paste staff writer in 2014. And without moving from Illinois to Georgia to accept that job, I never meet the woman who is now my wife in 2015. In some alternate reality, there’s a version of me who never saw The Room, and that poor guy is either still trying to make it in the world of daily newspapers, or has long since moved out of media entirely. I feel for him, even as I cringe internally at the idea that Tommy Wiseau might ultimately serve as a spiritual godfather to my hypothetical child. You know, metaphorically speaking.

Nor can I really be the only one who The Room ended up influencing in this way. The almost 120,000 members of a subreddit like r/badmovies could surely attest to this fact–without The Room, the group would be lacking what has to be one of its most universal shared experiences. It’s no coincidence that Tommy’s greasy black mane is found dead center in the row of actors at the top of the page, a sort of Mount Rushmore for derided and cast-off cinema. Just as it was for me, his ill-fated passion project was surely the starting point for so many other film geeks who have since journeyed down the rabbit hole of trashy or incompetent discovery.

And so, as The Room celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, it seems only fitting that I personally thank Tommy Wiseau, Greg Sestero and everyone else involved in the film’s creation for their entirely unintentional but nevertheless profoundly meaningful impact on the arc of my own life. I’m grateful that a chance encounter with this terrible melodrama set me down a path that eventually involved discovering even worse vanity projects such as GetEven or Fatal Deviation. I’m thankful for having seen cheesy trash like Tammy and the T-Rex, just as surely as I give thanks for witnessing the mind-bending work of Alejandro Jodorowsky or David Lynch. Hell, thanks for shunting me down a path where I eventually got to write about the likes of The Room for a living!

Pour the scotchka, and raise a glass to The Room. In the annals of bad movie history, there will never be anything else quite like it.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s resident genre guru. You can follow him on Twitter for much more film content.